You’re severely over-estimating him. RR relies on a good projectile assist to get in, his normals have short range, and he doesn’t have a true tri-dash. Also, his level 3 only works on grounded opponents. He’s not a bad character by any means, but as an anchor he has some issues. That said, it’s definitely been pulled off before:
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AGREED.
Vergil is way too unsafe to be viable as an anchor IMO, he can do the job dont get me wrong but you’ve gotta be extremely cautious because one whiff with no meter to DT or XF and Vergil is dead.
when vergil is in the anchor position as long as he has meter he is devastating. he can do spiral swords for massive chip to kill the last character and keep everything safe. that + DT + x factor makes him an absolute monster, no assists necessary. i think with meter vergil is possibly the best. he is very popular as anchor in japan.
If youre going that route you might as well play Strider anchor. He has a better assist than any of Vergils (Rapid Slash is vergils only decent assist and its only useful in certain situations), is safer than Vergil, has better mixups than Vergil without an assist backing them up, and is just as ridiculous with meter and X Factor.
Really Vergils only advantages are that he can take a little more abuse (though not much, vergils still pretty squishy), slightly less dependant on meter, and generally a little easier to use.
Theres really nothing unsafe about a Vergil stocked with meter or X-Factor, and theres nothing too scary about a Strider stocked with 1 meter. If a Vergil has X factor and swords active, you’re playing a straight 50/50 into death practically regardless of what you do, its also much derpier to land those easy confirms with Vergil ( I mean he can practically instant overhead you from half screen away with DT active )
They’re both great anchors, but Strider anchor is way harder to control and play than a Vergil anchor
Perhaps it might be better to classify anchors regarding what they can do as trying to figure out which on is the best is kind of context sensitive.
I generally think of “burst” anchors, like Wesker and Dark Phoenix as the ones who can abuse XF3 the most but once XF runs out, are basically done for the most part. I’d rather have these guys in a 1 on 3 situation as they can go Dark and take out another character (and generally dominate other XF3 characters) easily since that sort of comeback is generally built around a speedy K.O. as opposed to whittling away your opponents team.
Pressure anchors, like Doom and Sentinel can abuse XF3 but have built in faults (i.e. Doom getting kept out easily on his own w/o assists by hardcore zoning, Sentinel with linear but scary pressure) are more complete characters who don’t necessarily need XF to make a comeback. However, I would argue that generally they will get owned by extreme characters. Ask any Doom anchor about the 1 v 1 against Hawkeye and they will tell you it’s a royal pain in the ass or even worse the Sentinel versus Ammy matchup.
Chip anchors, like Hawkeye and Dorm (especially if opponent has burned XF already and you have meter) basically are near guaranteed chip damage that can eradicate a team that doesn’t have enough health to eat the damage. They can do really good damage stocked up on meter but without it, they have to rely on staying away which means you might have to spend time creating space and not always on offense. This is only really viable strategy against certain characters matchups so it can be tough.
Obviously there are blends of each (e.g. Akuma would be like a burst and pressure anchor in one) and all get benefits from XF3, but the final factor I would consider is the ease of execution. Since XF3 has pretty high speed increases, execution can become an issue. I think this is where characters like Strider and R.R. fail since their combos are already pretty timing sensitive (especially for the damage). Tack on the speed increase and it’s not hard for even the most gifted execution masters to drop combos with these characters.
I would argue the best burst anchors with low execution are Wesker (teleport, magic series, easy re-launch), Phoenix (simply because you can mash cr.l and teleport to kill a lot of characters) and maybe Wolvie as well but I’ve never tried him out as anchor. Akuma and Sentinel are probably the best pressure anchors since they have relatively easy combos execution wise. I’m hesitant to include Doom because if you actually want to pressure someone effectively, it’s a lot of execution to just get in, and then you have to do combos with him, which are also pretty hard. Chip anchors would probably be Hawkeye, Dorm and Ryu as they have nothing all that complicated.
Vergil is an interesting anchor because he has probably the easiest hit confirms in the game (that sword covers so much space like Dante) and can do absurd damage w/o assists or lots of meter and has fairly easy (albeit long) combos. Problem is that he’s terribly unsafe on whiff or naked teleport without spiral swords or XF which makes him free to people who have decent defenses in that situation.
I still think Ammy is the best anchor in the game
That’s great, now what happens when he doesn’t have either of those? Strider can just mix you up all day without meter or X Factor, Vergil can do that too to some extent, but his mixups are no where near as effective without an assist backing them up and if one of them gets anticipated you’re spending a meter or blowing your X Factor just to keep Vergil alive.
And again, the point people keep missing is that a good anchor isn’t just a character that is great with X Factor (otherwise Wolverine would be up for discussion) the anchor is also your primary assist character, and Vergil doesn’t have a good enough neutral game assist to warrant that place on a team.
Quite narrow minded thinking, all anchors are not designed to be the same kind of anchor.
If you’re burning all your X-Factors and meter on purpose before you get to Vergil, then you’re playing your team incorrectly. A more extreme example would be using your X-Factor and meters when you run a Phoenix anchor, it doesn’t make sense right? If you have an anchor that requires resources, don’t burn all your resources with no regard to the strengths of your team. Vergil very much so needs the X-Factor and meter.
Now if you’re speaking in a case where you did save your meter and X-Factor for Vergil and he used those resources, and now you still haven’t won the match, then you did something very wrong. Vergil has all the tools, and is extremely capable of running through a team within seconds, similar to a Wesker or Phoenix anchor, in fact thats the very reason that you DO put him on anchor. Its a bit silly to gauge the strength of an anchor when you’re putting them in a vacuum where they don’t have access to the tools that anchors almost always have.
But i’ll humor you, Vergil still has self 50-50 mixups with Round trip, god like sword normals for the neutral game, and can play the keepaway game just fine to build his own meter. Strider doesn’t have anything significant on him and its arguable that Strider is less reliant on assists than Vergil, not to mention that even if Strider is capable of creating openings more easily without X-factor/meter, Vergil has a much easier time killing someone off and will most likely need less openings.
I’ll just leave off with this. People really overinflate the value of anchors based on their assist. If it was really that important then anchors like Doom would be running through tournaments, but they aren’t.
Is Skrull a bad anchor? Felicia? Viper? Wesker? None of these guys are particularly impressive without X-Factor or meter, nor do they have access to top tier neutral game assists, but they’ll run through teams in the blink of the eye and are some of the scariest anchors in the game. The name of the game is Marvel, and you are most definitely going to run into situations where your 1st two characters get blown up and what happens then? Your precious neutral game assist means fuck all. Having a strong anchor in the back thats capable of turning the game around consistently is very important in the long run and closes up the holes in many mainstream Marvel teams.
Oh and, before someone tries to come in and turn this around on me, i’m not saying anchors like Strider or anchors that have game changing neutral assists are the worst anchors, because I know they aren’t, they’re even some of the best as well. I’m just saying its pretty ignorant to just write off all these excellent anchors just because of some silly pre-conceived notions of what anchors should be.
Winter Brawl 6 Top 16:
1st – EG|Justin Wong (Iron Fist/Wolverine/Akuma, Wolverine/Storm/Akuma)
2nd – LB|NYChrisG (Morrigan/Akuma/Doctor Doom, Ryu/Wesker/Hawkeye)
3rd – AG|MarlinPie (C. Viper/Doctor Doom/Amaterasu)
4th – Smooth Viper (Magneto/Sentinel/Dormammu)
5th – IGT|Unkn0wn (Nemesis/Sentinel/Wesker)
5th – DJ Huoshen (Felicia/Super Skrull/Taskmaster)
7th – AlukardNY (Wesker/Iron Man/Super Skrull)
7th – RayRay (Ryu/Magneto/Sentinel)
9th – TA|Predator1A (Haggar/Chris/Wesker)
9th – Omen (Spencer/Dante/Wesker)
9th – IC|Ruin (Magneto/Dormammu/Sentinel, Magneto/Doctor Doom/Sentinel)
9th – BIGE|FecalPenance (Felicia/Frank West/Dante, Deadpool/Dante/Felicia)
13th – XAQshinor (Nova/Vergil/Doctor Doom)
13th – Flocker (Zero/Vergil/Hawkeye)
13th – Blacktastic (Captain America/Sentinel/Storm)
13th – Royal Flush (MODOK/Thor/Viewtiful Joe)
Of these 20 teams, 12 of them have anchors that are used just as much for their assists as they are for their potential as point characters. The Top 8 is even more dominated by these teams (7/10), Id say that qualifies as running threw tournaments. And I’m not saying the characters you mentioned can’t be good anchors because yes they can be (I flat out said vergil can do the job earlier, I just dont think hes the best), but when it comes to the overall team it is more often than not better to have an anchor that can not only run threw a team in the blink of an eye but also provide an assist that helps the other two characters.
Extremely small sample size, and you should know by now that tournament results are more indicative of the player skill that was present, and not of the potential of the characters in the game.I didn’t say the assist value was nil, I just said people inflate its value way too much. Also you literally said verbatim “Vergil is way too unsafe to be viable as an anchor”. I already stated my opinion on the role of anchors and how its not just a pigeonholed definitive role.
rte
So I did, my mistake. But I also said he can get the job done he just has to play it extremely carefully. You can say anchors with great neutral game assists all you want but heres the deal, when youre first character dies and youre not playing an anchor with a valuable assist that means your second character basically has nothing to help them putting you at a severe disadvantage. Why do you think whenever anyone plays Noel Brown these days they don’t bother snapping in Wesker? Its because they know that once Wolverines dead the entire synergy of his team goes out the door.
I don’t even know what you’re trying to argue then, all I was saying is that you shouldn’t knock anchors without great neutral game assists, because they often serve a different type of anchor role, but if you acknowledge that, then its great.
Last I checked, snapping an anchor in has more to do with the threat of their potential to wipe your team in seconds regardless of how much you have outplayed your opponent, it has less to do with the value of their assist. Do people snap in Phoenix because that TK shot is going to ruin you? No of course not, its because shes going to blast through your team like dynamite if you don’t snap her in or do something to stop her from going Dark.
Theres a million and one reasons why people don’t snap in Noel Browns Wesker( as well as the reasons for snapping in general ) and thats a very one-dimensional argument but I won’t go into that. I don’t see a real reason to continue this if we’re both in agreement.
Im using Noel as an example, when UMVC3 first came out everyone snapped Wesker in because they were scared of Dark Wesker’s team wrecking abilities. Thats not as common anymore because people have figured out how to deal with him. TBH with you Im not even sure what I’m arguing over anymore either, the only point I was originally trying to make in the first place is that I disagree with Vergil being the best anchor in the game.
Dark Phoenix and Vergil
Vergil with 2 meters to sword crown and xfactor is plain retarded.
and people still sleeps on Anchor Arthur way too much.
Firebrand + xfactor 3 + luminous body + Level 3 hyper also has an insane level of retardness.
All three are so much better than Akuma, Wesker or Doom during xfactor 3 it’s not even funny…
Phoenix is still a capable anchor, but I like having Phoenix backed up with Ammy’s coldstar more. That leaves Ammy as a possible and very capable anchor. If something happens to D Phoenix, I like to still have that fighting chance. The bad things about Phoenix are meter conservation and fear of assisting with her. She does gimp your team a bit, but can definitely be worth it.
Deadpool is a good anchor also. He is so fast he gets a little bit difficult to control. Same goes for Felicia. Both are solid with good assist.
Dante can loop Volcano and j.S in XF3 early in combos (Volcano->j.S x3->Volcano->j.H->air play->j.S) for insane damage in a short amount of time (that’s 800k off a st.L), and late in combos just use DT->fly->thunderbolt. Dante combos can be dramatically short in XF if you just know what moves to use.
Also to all you Vergil naysayers, Vergil is safe as fuck.
Round trip is one of the best mixup tools in the game, you have normals that reach LITERALLY half screen, DT gives you self OTGs to confirm off your XF +frame helm breaker (lol wut?). Judgement cut becomes so positive that you can run full screen mixups off of it, in DT you can combo off judgement cut from full screen, rapid slash becomes really positive on block (along with lunar phase and rising sun I guess, but who cares about those right?). He can combo off of every throw.
And btw he also has spiral swords and sword storm (which is pretty much an anchor killer).
Even without meter XF3 Vergil is ridiculous. All he has to do is make you block stinger like ONCE and you’re FUCKED (st.H will do against characters without good range projectile invincible moves).
Just stop missing with your half screen normals.
I’m not sure why people still think swords xx teleport is a 50/50…it’s not just block normally. And no air-dash H should never be consider an instant overhead because even at the very fastest it is about 23 frames and has a super obvious tell (he leaves the fucking ground) and the odds of it crossing up are close to zero.
That being said he is still a top anchor. Not better than Dark Strider but he is good.